As the technological capacity for organizations to create, track, and retain data continues to grow, a variety of different technologies for transmitting and storing the rising tide of information have been developed. One such technology, data compression, allows for the reduction of data size by representing the data differently. At a later time, data may be restored for further processing. Many different types of data may be compressed according to many different compression techniques. Determining which compression technique to apply is often challenging. Some techniques are more effective, generating a greater reduction in data size, for some data, while for other data a different compression technique may be better suited. Often the ability to select a compression technique to apply to data may be limited by the resources required to perform various analyses on the data within the constraints of the entity that wishes to compress the data. Similarly, different compression techniques impose differing burdens to perform the compression technique. Thus, entities who wish to compress data are often limited by time, operational costs, and other compression selection criteria source limitations to efficiently compress data.
While embodiments are described herein by way of example for several embodiments and illustrative drawings, those skilled in the art will recognize that embodiments are not limited to the embodiments or drawings described. It should be understood, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit embodiments to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include,” “including,” and “includes” mean including, but not limited to.